Loop Hero

2023-07-15
Preemptively putting in my review now because this is just one of those games I don't think I can make myself continue playing to finish. On paper I thought I'd like it. You go in a little loop and you passively auto-battle stuff and you pick up gear and modify the map to increase the difficulty of the battles, getting stronger, fighting stronger stuff, on and on till you fight the boss. Except it's SO SLOW. And it's SO BORING. The amount of agency you have feels extraneous. Sure I can put a card here or there who cares. I get tons of loot but most of it is dubiously better or worse. There aren't builds that I can see. Items and cards seem to not have any cool synergy so most of the actions you're taking barely matter. And then the loops themselves take like 30 minutes (apparently because I haven't finished one). And then you have persistence for the town to upgrade things but after getting pretty far in 3 loops I only had enough for one building. Woof what a slog.

It feels like Vampire Survivors is the antithesis to this. It's idle but not as idle because you're constantly controlling your character to position them to do optimal damage. Each item you pick up matters and they synergize with each other so you're always planning what to do next. So while loops similarly take 30 minutes you're engaged the entire time. This seems to miss all the lessons from other roguelike games of the sort like Slay the Spire and Binding of Isaac and the end result is something that's just...boring.